When you open the File Menu and choose Export, InDesign gives youthe option of exporting as an Adobe PDF Print, or PDF Interactive.And as I said earlier, I have a wholetitle here in the online training library about Interactive PDF's.Here I'm just going to focus on the PDF print format.I'll click Save and up comes the Export Adobe PDF dialogue box.And there are a ton of options in this dialogue box.Don't worry, I'll cover most of them in this chapter and the next.But right now I'm just going to show you the basic process.

I'm going to choose an Adobe PDF preset from this pop up menu up here.In fact, I'm going to choose PDFX1A.Then, I'm going to make sure the View PDF after exporting check box is turned on.I like that because I like to see the PDF open in Acrobat when it's done.And now I'm about to click Export.But before I do, I want you to pay attention tothis little area way up here at the top of the screen.To the right of these little icons.Up in the area called the Application Bar.Okay?You watching?I'm going to click the Export button and you'llsee there's a little animation playing up there.

That animation tells you that InDesign is exporting the PDF in the background.That's so that you can keep working while InDesign is exporting.It's really helpful.As soon as the PDF is successfully exported, theanimation stops and InDesign opens the PDF in Acrobat.That looks pretty good.I'm going to close the PDF and go back to InDesign because I want to showyou one other way that you can see what's going on in the background.And that is to go to the Window menu,choose the Utilities submenu, and then choose, Background Tasks.

This panel is really helpful if you need to export a bunchof PDFs in a row, because you can watch the export progress here.I should point out that in earlier versions of InDesign, you had to makethis panel wider, or else everything would get all squished and you couldn't read it.In this case I'm simply going to move it out of the way.Now speaking of exporting a lot of PDFs, let me show you a shortcut.I'm going to hold down the Shift key on mykeyboard and then I'm going to go to the File menu.Choose the Adobe PDF Presets submenu and then choose one of these PDF presets.

When I do that, InDesign asks me where Iwant to save my PDF and what I want to call it.And then when I click OK, it just saves it.You don't even have to look at that huge export options dialog box.You see, there it is in the Background Tasks panel, exporting away.I can even click this little x to cancel the export, which can be handy sometimes.

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Released

6/27/2014

Making a PDF: it seems like such an easy thing, but it's the way you make the PDF and the settings you choose that make a huge difference in quality, not to mention whether your printer will accept or reject your file. Learn everything you need to know to create a great print PDF with Adobe InDesign from insider David Blatner. David covers terminology, destination considerations, transparency flattening, and Adobe's large selection of presets. Once you have the basics out of the way, he'll show you how to optimize your PDFs for print and address common scenarios PDF designers face, like converting text to outlines and creating PDFs for email.